Jaimee Eat World

Somewhere along the way I grew fearful of my own cowardice so I started just kind of forcing myself to do things.

Can’t Explain Why It Sticks

Depending on who you ask or what period of my life you look at, I have been both shamefully timid and unabashedly courageous.

I guess it just depends what else is going on at the time and how much that impacts my confidence or my willingness to fail, but it’s kind of funny how I’ve managed to skirt both ends of this vast spectrum.

In either case, I spend entirely too much time in my own head building sometimes irrational pros and cons lists or catastrophizing as I touched on last week. Rarely do I wind up feeling things will be “fine” before I decide on a pathway – I just become more comfortable with the idea that it won’t be and that this is some sort of necessary evil to positive change and growth.

Mostly I just hate the idea of not knowing what could be at the end of an unknown road, so I decide it’s usually worth at least scoping out.

I Can Waste One Million Chances

I’ve probably talked about this before, it’s one of those recurring things that makes it rounds periodically… but the roads in this life are infinite. There are entirely too many and we just can’t travel all of them. I think that’s why I’ve always enjoyed writing – it’s sort of the only way you can do it and even then, you’re basically cheating and faking it anyway, so it’s not quite as fulfilling as really living through an experience.

These days I do try to be more purposeful with my choices, though. Opportunities come up often to travel a new road, but it’s not always smart to take it just for the sake of it and I know that just because it’s suddenly at the forefront of thought doesn’t mean it’s some sort of divine intervention or sign from the cosmos.

Sometimes it’s a good thing to waste chances and I think it’s important not to get lost in considered them wasted. Since you haven’t taken the road, you have no idea if it was ever worth walking at all.

Keep Dreaming

I’m babbling a bit today because I’m on the precipice of change and I don’t really know where to go from here or how much thought or effort I should be putting into attempting to choose a defined road. Do we ever really choose? I don’t know.

I’ve found myself thinking a bit about what has led to these last few weeks and by that I mean what led me to the privledge of caring for my sweet Dakota.

There are a lot of things about my decision to get married that I consider a magnificent waste of time and effort, but it was not long after I got engaged that I had the unshakable urge to get a dog again. I’d grown up with dogs and it had been a few years since I had one after moving out of my parents house and I was feeling like it was what was really missing in my life at the time. Getting engaged seemed to trigger this new phase of life, grounding us to Toronto and opening the possibility of expanding our little family in a more sensible way for where we were at in our lives, by getting a dog rather than having a child.

As luck would have it, the breeder I initially reached out to had just sold the last pup from her litter, but she knew of another in Angus, Ontario that might still have a couple. By the time we got in touch, she was down to just 3 pups; 2 girls and the last boy. And that’s how I found Dakota who has provided me with incredible enrichment I can’t even properly formulate into words right now.

If I hadn’t gotten engaged, I never would have met him. That alternate reality is unfathomable to me after how much we’ve bonded these last 10 years.

Tomorrow I have to be courageous for him jut as he always has been for me; I have to say goodnight for the last time and I’m just not sure what life could possibly look like without him. His impact has been tremendous and I have already been deep in grief over what hasn’t yet happened. My world will certainly never be as bright.

For now, I am just fortunate that I was able to get pulled of the shift I was supposed to work today and we are having great weather to spend the day together. He’s enjoyed another visit to the park and is resting in the garden – he’s done this ever since the first day I brought him home, he loves the coolness of the soil the same way I love the warmth of the sun.

Over that last few nights I’ve caught him kicking around his paws while he was sleeping and I imagined all the funny things he must dream about and thought about all the ones I’ve had with him in my own. I am almost always saving him from one thing or another and I am heartbroken that this time, I can’t.

Tomorrow will not be fine.

And I don’t know where the road beyond it leads, but I know he’ll always be with me and that makes everything else that led here worthwhile.

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One Mill was previously released with the Surviving cover record. This is an updated mix. You can hear the originally released mix here: